The post Durban at 25: The Conference That Changed the War Against Israel first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

Conspiracy theories have recently entered Israeli political discourse. Right-wing MKs and other figures on the extreme right have promoted false conspiracy theories concerning the defense establishment, October 7, and other matters. This is egregious not only because it falsely accuses people of severe crimes and undermines trust in the most important security organizations, but also because of the deep connection between conspiracy theorizing and antisemitism.

Antisemitism is not simply another form of prejudice. Jews, like Black people, Asians, and other groups, can of course be subjected to ordinary stereotypes and discrimination. Antisemitic beliefs have portrayed Jews as physically repellent, disease-bearing, stingy, or clannish. But antisemitism has also frequently gone further. As the noted historian Deborah Lipstadt has pointed out, Jews have repeatedly been made the objects of conspiracy theories. Contemporary figures such as Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson have promoted narratives portraying Jews or Israel not merely as oppressors or colonialists, but as exercising hidden and disproportionate control over major events and institutions – American foreign policy, for example, or migration to the United States and Europe. The classic antisemitic conspiracy text, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, purported to reveal a secret Jewish plot to control and enslave the world and to manipulate major historical events.

There is an important difference between ordinary prejudice and the belief that a particular group is secretly conspiring against society or humanity as a whole. Prejudice can produce discrimination, segregation, exploitation, violence, and even mass killing. But a totalizing conspiracy theory adds something particularly dangerous: it presents its target as an organized, hidden, existential enemy. Within that worldview, physically eliminating the imagined conspiracy can come to seem necessary for society’s survival. As Norman Cohn put it, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion became a “warrant for genocide.”

Jews have not been the only objects of such theories. The European witch persecutions, in which tens of thousands of women and men were executed after being accused of serving the Devil and conspiring against Christian society, provide another example of the murderous potential of conspiracy thinking. But conspiracy theories have shown a remarkable tendency to return to the Jews. Jews were often executed along with “witches,” and narratives about hidden forces behind the French Revolution eventually acquired a strongly antisemitic character. Contemporary conspiracy movements have likewise absorbed longstanding antisemitic themes and images.

In other words, conspiracy theorizing is a way of understanding the world that is not exclusively directed against Jews. But historically it has had particularly destructive consequences for them.

This is why it is so alarming to see this mode of thinking entering Israeli political discourse. Whatever their immediate political purpose, such claims normalize precisely the kind of reasoning that has so often been turned against Jews: the assumption that behind traumatic or incomprehensible events lies a hidden cabal deliberately manipulating them for its own purposes.

There is also a danger beyond Israel. When prominent Israelis themselves embrace conspiratorial explanations involving secret networks of power and betrayal, they inadvertently lend legitimacy to similar forms of thinking about Jews circulating in Europe and North America. The subjects may be different, but the intellectual habits are disturbingly familiar.

The fact that many antisemites are conspiracy theorists does not mean that all conspiracy theorists are antisemites. But in real life, not everything follows the rules of formal logic. Conspiracy theories and antisemitism do have an affinity and important features in common, including the tendency to frame accusations in such a way that refutation does not affect the accuser. Having suffered from this for centuries, do we really want it in our public life?

History gives Jews particular reason to recognize where conspiracy-inflected intellectual habits can lead. Conspiracy theories have never been good for the Jews. There is no reason to believe that they will be good for Israel.

Published in the Jewish Journal

The post Conspiracy Theories Have Never Been Good for the Jews; They Won’t Be Good for Israel first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

Israel’s national security doctrine, formulated by David Ben-Gurion in the 1950s, rests on three pillars: deterrence, early warning, and decisive victory.

Deterrence is meant to persuade the enemy that it cannot defeat Israel and therefore, rationally, should refrain from attacking. If deterrence fails, intelligence must provide sufficient warning to mobilize the reserves, allowing Israel to maintain a relatively small standing army in peacetime. And decisive victory means seeking unequivocal wins as quickly as possible while shifting the fighting onto enemy territory. Victory restores deterrence, postpones the next war, and gives Israel time to grow stronger between conflicts.

Is this doctrine still valid after October 7?

Some say no. Hamas was not deterred, intelligence failed to provide warning, and Israel did not achieve a swift, decisive victory. This, they argue, was no accident but the result of a changed reality: many of our enemies are now terrorist organizations rather than state actors; their motivations are ideological and religious and do not necessarily conform to conventional calculations of deterrence; the arena itself has changed – our enemies are no longer only those massed along our borders. The doctrine, therefore, must be rethought.

Others argue that the classical doctrine remains sound, but that Israel, lulled by overconfidence, failed to follow it. We did not create deterrence – we simply assumed it existed, and we were wrong. We dismissed warning signs that were, in fact, there. And for years, we abandoned the pursuit of decisive victory in favor of “managing the conflict” and “quiet in return for quiet.” On this view, Israel must return to Ben-Gurion’s principles and apply them with resolve. A third approach would preserve the classical doctrine while adding two further elements: defense – the ability to withstand a surprise attack if deterrence and advance warning fail – and preemption – taking the initiative to eliminate emerging threats before they fully ripen.

But this debate is taking place on too narrow a field. National security doctrine must address not only how we confront enemies waging physical war against us, but also those waging a battle to shape global consciousness – the perceptions and narratives through which Israel is understood. National security is measured not only by our ability to defend our borders, but also by Israel’s standing in the international arena.

Until recently, Israel’s relations with the United States and several leading European countries constituted a formidable diplomatic Iron Dome, protecting us in critical arenas – security, economics, diplomacy, law, and culture. In recent years, and especially since October 7, we have been losing ground in the battle over global consciousness. Negative views of Israel are becoming increasingly entrenched. Challenges to the legitimacy of the Jewish nation-state are finding traction. The demonization of Israel is gaining ground both in the European Union, Israel’s largest trading partner, and in the United States, our most important security and diplomatic ally.

The evidence is mounting not only in public opinion polls but also in concrete actions. Our adversaries could achieve their own “total victory” in this struggle if a future American president decided to impose an arms embargo on Israel. Is that really inconceivable? The consequences could be devastating. Not everything is within our control. Deep currents of antisemitism, polarizing identity politics, social media platforms that traffic in hatred, social inequality, and other forces are poisoning the international arena. But much does depend on us – both through what we fail to do and through what we actually do.

Our failure to act has been profound. Israel has largely been absent from this battlefield – if by presence we mean the formulation and implementation of a coherent strategy. For too many years, our national investment in this arena was negligible – less than the cost of a single Israeli Air Force squadron. And some of our own actions hand our enemies ammunition. We alienate the world – including our friends – when we tolerate Jewish terrorism, use disproportionate force, engage in racist rhetoric, and erode confidence in our own democratic institutions.

The bottom line is clear: if we lose the battle over global consciousness, Israel’s national security will be gravely weakened. Israel will not be able to flourish as it once did if it comes to be regarded as a “Sparta” – an embattled fortress-state living by the sword behind high walls.

We need to change course.

First, Israel must establish an authoritative institutional framework for this mission. Alongside the three organizations responsible for our physical security – the IDF at our borders, the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) at home, and the Mossad abroad – we need a fourth national body of comparable authority and stature charged with conducting the battle over global consciousness.

Second, Israeli policy across the board, including the use of military force, must be shaped by a national security doctrine that recognizes this battle as critical to securing our future.

Published in the Jerusalem Post

The post Israel’s battle for global consciousness: Why the Sparta doctrine harms national security first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

On Tuesday night, amid a series of primary battles across the United States, a significant development emerged regarding the way Israel is perceived by local voters. On the one hand, the night marked a troubling milestone: Progressive candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a physician who rose through Detroit’s healthcare system and is a harsh critic of Israel, won the Democratic Senate primary in Michigan against candidate Haley Stevens, who was backed by AIPAC.

Michigan is a swing state where Trump won two of the last three presidential elections. Although some polls gave El-Sayed a commanding lead of more than 11 percentage points, the gap narrowed considerably by the time polls closed, with the final margin relatively small compared with the level of support he had been projected to receive. This should likely raise serious concerns among Democrats regarding the party’s chances of retaining Michigan’s Senate seat.

The phenomenon illustrates the rise of the progressive Muslim wave that has swept across America, beginning with the election of Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar in 2018 to Congress as part of what later became known as “the Squad,” continuing through Zohran Mamdani’s 2025 election as New York City mayor and, about a month ago, the election of three candidates backed by him to the House of Representatives from New York City. Those developments prompted past Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, said to be considering another run, to meet with Mamdani as well as pro-Palestinian activists and progressive figures.

But immediately afterward, it is necessary to look up and examine the broader picture. Alongside these developments, Tuesday night also saw a series of primary contests in which AIPAC scored decisive victories. Above all, the powerful message that emerged from voters in Detroit and St. Louis is one that every Israeli should understand, especially current policymakers and members of the new government that will soon be formed.

A noteworthy detail

Let us begin with the tactical victories, several of which contain important details worth noting. From Michigan’s 11th District came remarkable news: Jewish candidate Jeremy Moss, whom many remember from a photo of him proudly marching with an Israeli flag in Tel Aviv during a protest, scored a major victory over progressive Muslim candidate Aisha Farooqi, who suffered a decisive defeat.

At the same time, it is impossible not to be moved by the impressive comeback of Elaine Luria from Virginia’s 2nd District. Luria, a former nuclear submarine commander, is remembered for her famous “J’accuse” style speech against Ilhan Omar after Omar questioned her loyalty to the United States. It is a speech worth watching and reflecting on. These achievements bring us to the geopolitical opportunity before us at this moment, because we must discuss the historic alliance between American Jewry and Israel and the African American community.

It is important to remember that Martin Luther King Jr. was a major supporter of Israel and that, at the time, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marched arm in arm in Selma, Alabama, carrying a Torah scroll alongside leaders of the Black community. This strong bond existed during the 1960s and 1970s but has steadily weakened in recent years.

Tuesday night’s elections sent a particularly strong message from heavily African American districts, first and foremost from Detroit, where 75% of the population is African American. The city’s large Black electorate sent an unequivocal message to the Democratic Party, saying clearly: We are not willing to be represented by progressives. In Detroit, El-Sayed suffered a resounding defeat against Stevens, contrary to polls that had given him an advantage. The result points to significant cracks within the Democratic Party that should be a source of serious concern.

The same occurred in St. Louis, which has a large African American community of around 45%. Candidate Wesley Bell won there. Bell already had defeated progressive Cori Bush in 2024, but the direct confrontation over attitudes toward Israel and his victory on that issue proved themselves once again, as he received nearly 60% of the vote against Bush in their rematch.

Jesse Jackson’s daughter converts to Judaism

Alongside the political arena, a particularly fascinating and surprising cultural development has recently emerged: Ashley, the daughter of civil rights icon Jesse Jackson, who is remembered in history for his tense and complicated relationship with the Jewish community, in June completed a conversion process to Judaism, choosing the Hebrew name Miriam Yiskah. Ashley even invited her father to attend a synagogue service with her two years before he died. The event reflects deeper currents and a renewed cultural connection between the communities.

The message sent after Tuesday’s primaries to all decision-makers at the Foreign Ministry, the Prime Minister’s Office and elsewhere must be sharp and clear: Which progressive messages are causing such widespread rejection among African American voters? And how can we, at least initially, build a shared struggle that restores the historic bond and recreates the affection that existed during the 1960s and 1970s?

It is true that the direction in which the United States is heading is troubling. But just as we reinvented ourselves in the 1970s through a brilliant outreach campaign toward evangelical audiences, we now need to rethink which communities share broad common ground with us, how we cultivate those relationships and how we build a coalition capable of working with us in a courageous and relevant way.

Published on Ynet

The post The Black vote, Israel and the 2026 primaries: This is the political shift Washington should watch first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

Nearly three years into this unconscionable spike in Jew-hatred, cultivated through decades of academic anti-Zionism, universities still don’t get it. Until they respond as teachers running educational institutions not bureaucrats running Communist re-education camps, the crisis will fester.

This summer, when a Cornell student refused a second job interview with: “Not interested in working for a jew…,” the response to him was too political and legalistic. Exposed, he doubled down, telling The Cornell Daily Sun that he realized the interviewers were Jewish based on their “first and last name, LinkedIn, and physiognomy” – the last word uniting today’s manosphere with yesterday’s Nazis.

Defending free speech while fighting bigotry and avoiding thought-policing isn’t easy. But a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article about the incident illustrated academics’ overly-politicized and disappointingly sterile approach. Thirty percent of the op-ed bashed President Trump and his appointees, assuming that Cornell officials only investigated this as a possible “bias incident” to placate the administration.

Cornell, the author argued, “should not be ‘investigating’ anyone for what they have said. Its own ‘Core Values’ statement declares that ‘free and open inquiry and expression’ — even of ‘ideas some may consider wrong or offensive’ — is fundamental to the university.” Warning of a slippery slope, while shifting the conversation from bigoted language to inflammatory political remarks, the author wondered: If Cornell “penalizes” the student “for declaring that he doesn’t want to work for Jews, who will be next? Someone who says Israel is committing genocide? Or that the university should boycott it?”

This clever category switch is absurd, given how universities spent years squelching speech. Academics have repeatedly – and unacceptably — bullied those with dissenting views on issues of race, gender, immigration, among other politically-correct causes – while protecting blacks, women, gays, but often not Jews. In 2020, students boycotted a Cornell University Law Professor, William Jacobson, for calling Black Lives Matters’ founders “anti-American, anti-capitalist activists.” His dean denounced him.

Other professors have suffered macro-career disruptions over supposed micro-aggressions – one veteran UCLA prof endured student sit-ins and was saddled with extra colleagues encroaching on his course for correcting grammar in papers.

While avoiding such assaults on free speech in the future, universities must also acknowledge their record of selective outrage.

In the Cornell case, apply a simple substitution test for consistency. Flip a switch. Replace “black,” “woman,” “gay,” “lesbian,” or “trans” in the sentence “Not interested in working for a jew.” Similarly, the student escalated on X, tweeting: “My experiences with Jews have not been pleasant….” Wouldn’t it be “bias” if he overgeneralized about others, saying “my experiences” with blacks or women or Catholics or Latinos “have not been pleasant?” Universities’ assault on bigotry cannot depend on “the context” — when “context” essentially means “it’s OK to target Jews.”

Hysteria and browbeating don’t help. Modeling that spirit, the employer who received the bigoted response posted it without the student’s name. “He’s just a student, he might not know any better — it could be people in his environment, or on social media he saw something about Jewish people and he is just following the wave,” the spurned boss, Gabe Einhorn, told the Cornell Sun. (Others online outed the student).

And this case is particularly confusing. Refusing a Jew because you’re a bigot isn’t “discrimination.” The student didn’t offend a fellow Cornellian, which dilutes the assault on the “community.”

Also, the student sought employment privately – does it concern Cornell if the university placement office helped, but is it irrelevant if he networked independently? Does placing Cornell’s name on his CV make anything he does on the job relevant to the university? Does that involvement end with graduation?

Fighting bigotry requires balance, perspective, wisdom. The cancel culture craze revealed how suffocating it is to police every word, gesture, interaction, and how self-destructive it is when universities divert massive resources into creating bureaucracies monitoring students’ thoughts. Moreover, it’s always better to err on the side of fostering free speech than banning it.

Here, then, is the misfire in the anti-bias conversation, that highlights one of the modern universities’ greatest failures. These are educational institutions. But most universities have allowed bureaucrats – in Washington and on campus – to hijack what could be “teachable moments.” Technical legalistic bureaucratese keeps eclipsing the moral language and character building that should be ingrained into campus culture.

Cornell[s “mission” is “to educate the next generation of global citizens….” Global citizens are cultivated by thoughtful, challenging professors committed to educating not punishing. Did any of this student’s professors or fellow students – Jewish or non-Jewish — contact him, explaining why the statement embarrassed him and the university, then inspire him to be better? And, did any one within the Jewish community, formally or inflormally, do the same, explaining how, especially today, such matter-of-fact bigotry is so morally repulsive?

Next month, most universities will welcome their new students with orientations. Most will offer anti-bias or sensitivity training reflecting today’s ideological circus, with all the soul of a computer instruction manual. Just as modern professors and administrators fail to build their community through bold, out-of-the-box, “I-thou” moments, these training sessions will fail to begin fostering what’s really needed to create diverse communities filled with critical thought and mutual respect.

It’s better to assign great, thought-provoking books than to list dos-and-don’ts. Today’s bureaucratic, hyper-politicized, and cowardly professoriate forgets that, as Ralph Waldo Emerson taught: “Character is higher than intellect…. A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think.”

Then again, perhaps these paint-by-numbers posturing sessions are precisely the orientation students need to grab their credentials and parrot back the certitudes imposed by far too many in today’s classroom.

Published in the Jewish Journal

The post Professors Should Fight Campus Jew-Hatred as Educators, Not Bureaucrats first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

Trained to avoid rushing to judgment, we historians know there will be far more to learn about Monday’s Montreal bloodbath, wherein a terrorist killed one police officer and one civilian.

The police claim the terrorist was not antisemitic and that the resulting murder of a beloved Jew in the Jewish neighborhood attacked is coincidental.

Assuming that conclusion holds, Canadians and their leaders must admit that even if antisemitism didn’t trigger this crime, the lynch-mob mentality against Jews, Zionism, and Israel drove it as well as other acts of political violence. The same argument holds when terrorists attack areas with no Jews at all. It’s essential to recognize that by tolerating so much antisemitism and “Zionophobia” – hostility toward Zionists – many Canadians helped foster an atmosphere of political totalitarianism breeding extremism, zealotry, and violence.

Silence often speaks volumes. Those who keep quiet while others harass Jews, Israelis, and Zionists broaden the zone of tolerance for all forms of brutality. In healthy democracies, there are no innocent bystanders; when fellow citizens are besieged, silence is complicity.

Lack of public reaction to antisemitism

Jesse Brown opens his March 2026 Atlantic essay, “Canada’s Polite Pogrom,” with a devastating line. Describing how the University of British Columbia’s Ed Rosenberg quit teaching geriatric medicine after 30 years, Brown explains that the antisemitic bile students and colleagues at the University of British Columbia posted after October 7 was bad enough. Nevertheless: “He did not resign because of the messages…; he resigned because the university wouldn’t do anything about them.”

Antisemites around him could be dismissed – it’s hard to feel betrayed by twisted people who celebrated such perversions. But Rosenberg and so many others have felt betrayed by so-called “innocent bystanders” and supposedly responsible administrators who did nothing.

The insult is compounded by a cancel culture and DEI bureaucracy exaggerating the slightest slips into massive grievances – when it comes to other groups. Selective silence is equally painful, double-crossing the targeted – and emboldening aggressors. On June 1, Prime Minister Mark Carney modeled the kind of political cherry-picking that justifies using the cliché “doing more harm than good.”

Carney’s 2600-word speech about antisemitism never used the Z-word, Zionism, and only mentioned Israel once. That’s like denouncing Southern racism without defining it as an obsessive bigotry against blacks.

Linking anti-Zionism with antisemitism is not some Jewish delusion; it’s a conscious stance wired deeply into the Palestinian national movement’s DNA. Palestinians and their enablers yell “Death to the Jews” and target Jewish schools, synagogues and individuals when they’re enraged by Israel.

Palestinians and their enablers recycle old Jewish stereotypes and dip their anti-Zionism in the toxic reservoir of anti-Semitic slurs. And it’s Palestinians and their enablers who have fed a spike of Jew-hatred since October 7, because the antisemitic anti-Zionism of Hamas and other Gazans on that bloody day inspired them. Carney’s omission was particularly glaring because he o so earnestly, speaking in French, invoked the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor to explain Canada’s “celebration of differences.”

That acceptance reflects Taylor’s notion of “recognition,” Carney explained, which “is more than mere tolerance…. To be recognised is to be received as who you are.” How ironic that in this speech Canada’s prime minister refused to recognize or receive how Zionists are – or admit how much they have been pursued.

These full and partial silences help amplify today’s shouters, who continue to believe they run the conversation. They dominate the airwaves, the headlines, and social media. Today’s loud, often foul-mouthed, hotheads view everything through a partisan lens – which paves the road to totalitarianism.

Reducing our complex world to a series of all-or-nothing political propositions oversimplifies and inflames discourse simultaneously. Extremists thrive in this highly charged atmosphere. They make politics tribal – us versus them. And they escalate identity into zealotry.

Belonging is no longer enough. Bullying the other becomes expected, fundamental – first, most easily, in Tweets, then in words to strangers, then in breakups over politics with friends and relatives. Once that happens, once you’ve demonized and objectified the other, it’s easy for unstable maniacs to turn violent. After all, everyone else has convinced them that if you dare disagree with me – you’re an existential threat to me and our democracy.

Canada’s turn from Canada the decent and delightfully boring, to Canada the indecent and menacing, reflects this evil logic’s spellbinding power. Of course, not every terrorist or partisan firebrand is a Jew-hater or an anti-Zionist. But Jew-hating and Israel-bashing green-lighted a culture of political fervor and abuse.

We now live in a world – in democracies – where healthy functioning adults – not just lunatics – act crazy. They shun colleagues and friends, harass shopkeepers or customers, hit little kids, shoot their schools, and assault their places of worship, proudly, while earning high-fives in return.

For decades we’ve known in theory – it starts with the Jews, but never ends with the Jews. The words were mouthed – and are mouthed whenever Jews are targeted. We need more than words. The twin evil genies of Jew-hatred and political violence, which have long been intertwined, have been unleashed, and Jews aren’t responsible for returning either foul force into its bottle.

Jews should focus on defending themselves just enough to feel free to double down on being Zionist, doing Jewish, and celebrating Israel. It’s the much larger non-Jewish world that must remember two long-lasting lessons. Jew-hatred is the disease of the non-Jew, not the Jew.

And citizens in healthy democracies must defeat the totalitarian, conspiratorial, violence-breeding evil of antisemitism, doing it, not for the Jews’ sake, but for the sake of their own societies, and their own souls.

Published in the Jerusalem Post

The post Jew-hatred drove the Montreal violence, even if it didn’t trigger it first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, more than 2 million Jews arrived in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. This mass immigration turned New York into the cornerstone of Diaspora Jewry and cemented its status as the largest Jewish city in the world. From this vast community emerged a long line of Jewish politicians with historic influence. Chief among them is Sen. Chuck Schumer.

Schumer currently serves as Senate minority leader, after serving as majority leader from 2020 to 2024 under the Biden administration. He is the Jew elected to the highest office in American history and for many years placed the cultivation and strengthening of U.S.-Israel ties at the top of his agenda. In recent years, however, Schumer has been forced to contend with growing pressure inside his party, leading him to adopt more cautious positions.

In recent years, we have witnessed a troubling and dangerous shift in New York City. Beyond the broader rise in hostility toward Israel, there is a growing trend of candidates being elected to public office precisely on that ticket. The driving force behind this profound change is the radical wing of the Democratic Party, especially the Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA.

The peak of this radicalization process was reflected in the election of DSA figure Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City. Mamdani has pursued a hostile and extreme line against Israel, including a conspicuous refusal to take part in the Israel parade.

The mayor-elect has called for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s arrest, and his policies are reflected on the ground in his veto of municipal legislation intended to prevent intimidating protests outside Jewish schools.

His attitude toward Israel and the Jewish community is clearer than ever, as seen in the sharp attack he launched last week against the AIPAC lobby, which he called a “monster.”

Despite these positions, he continues to enjoy enormous popularity. Mamdani bet on support for radical candidates such as Claire Valdez, Brad Lander and Darializa Avila Chevalier. The long line of people waiting in a park to take selfies with him after the Knicks won the NBA championship shows the depth of his support. In effect, New York underwent a political upheaval overnight: Mamdani’s candidates won, and supporters of Israel received a warning sign.

The danger of Chevalier

The most worrying focal point is Chevalier, who defeated veteran Rep. Adriano Espaillat in District 13. Chevalier’s background, including her conversion to Islam, dovetails with her extreme political positions against Israel. At the same time, the hostile atmosphere directed at Jewish elected officials is evident, and troubling footage shows her organizing the pro-Palestinian protest held just two days after the October 7 massacre.

This toxic atmosphere is seeping into the city’s streets and creating the painful sense that Jews are no longer welcome in their own home, as reflected in reports of growing feelings of insecurity.

The case of Jewish Rep. Dan Goldman, who lost the primary to Brad Lander, offers a glimpse into the loss of a sense of safety among Jewish figures in the public sphere. Lander, identified with the far-left wing, has become a vocal critic of Israel and has led a sharply oppositional line against its policies. Goldman was disgracefully expelled this week from a cafe in his own city, an incident that illustrates the depth of the rupture.

The current election campaign centered in large part on the demand to halt arms sales to Israel, a watershed issue for the winning candidates who sanctified their hostility. From the outside, New York, the city that created the Israel parade in the 1960s, is now becoming the spearhead of the fight against it.

Anyone who sees all this as an inevitable “demographic process” is wrong and misleading others. This is cold, calculated political engineering. In midterm primaries, candidates are elected on the basis of just tens of thousands of votes in safe seats. This system allows for the relatively easy takeover of districts, flooding Congress and local authorities with radical representatives, just as the Tea Party did to the Republican Party, only in the opposite and more extreme direction.

This is a systematic attempt, from within, to change the DNA of the Democratic Party and turn it into a fringe party. Americans watching from the sidelines understand that this is a culture war over the character of America. If the Democratic Party does not stop this internal radicalization, it may find itself not only out of power in 2026 and 2028, but completely disconnected from the American public in whose name it claims to speak.

Published on Ynet

The post New York: from global Jewish capital to anti-Israel hub first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

Political violence is like pollution – no matter what the source, it threatens everyone. Rav Joseph Soloveitchik, the great 20th-century sage, explained that Jews still fast, mourning the assassination of Gedaliah ben Ahikam in 586 B.C.E., because “the enemy was not from without but from within… It serves as a reminder that we are our own worst enemy when we allow internal strife to eclipse our shared identity.” Nevertheless, this third assassination attempt against President Donald Trump triggered another round of hypocritical attacks blasting political violence – from the other side.

On CNN, Dana Bash asked Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), who has called Trump a “fascist,” a “tyrant” and a “gangster” guilty of “murder”: “You have, as many of your fellow Democrats, have, used some heated rhetoric against the president. And do you think twice about that when something like this happens?” Raskin stunned everyone by sounding stunned, asking: “What rhetoric do you have in mind?” Similarly, Trump’s press secretary blamed the assault on the Democrats’ “systemic demonization” of Trump amid a “left-wing cult of hatred.”

This is not the pathway to healing. Sanctimonious calls for unity in between partisan rants only backfire. Speaking out of one side of your mouth won’t stop this scourge. All must condemn left-wing, right-wing and Jihadi terrorism consistently. Today’s scorching political rhetoric fuels this exhibitionist violence, as indoctrination eclipses inquiry, certainty banishes uncertainty, and demonization discourages debate – online, on the air and even in too many classrooms.

Increasingly, with only one in four attending religious services weekly, Americans are replacing their grandparents’ overriding faith in religion with political orthodoxy. Many fill the God-sized holes in their hearts with simplistic slogans shortcircuiting their brains – and curdling their souls. More and more seek out romantic partners who agree with them politically, while avoiding conversations with those who dare to disagree.

This polarized environment has even colored how people view the violent acts that recently wracked the nation. Three-quarters of Democrats deemed the 2020 George Floyd protests peaceful – despite rioting that caused over a billion dollars of damage and killed dozens – while 54% of Republicans deemed the protests violent. Yet, 81% of Democrats called the January 6, 2021 Capitol Hill riot an “insurrection,” with 74% of Republicans disagreeing.

Partisans keep confusing ends and means. Believing in your cause doesn’t require justifying violence carried out in its name. Actually, the most fervent believers carry special responsibility – they have the street cred among their comrades to discourage violence.

Instead, while pro-Palestinian groups have been most identified with the dishonorable, nihilistic, antidemocratic (and antisemitic) cry “by any means necessary,” it’s become an all-purpose rationale whenever your allies overreach. We need the opposite. We need Palestinian and Muslim activists condemning anti-Zionist and anti-Western Jihadi terrorism, socialists decrying the December 2024 murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO, liberals mourning Charlie Kirk and conservatives condemning attacks targeting Democrats ranging from Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul Pelosi to Pennsylvania’s Governor Josh Shapiro.

Instead, too many political leaders and influencers are so angry, they forget that their political rivals are fellow citizens too. In November, President Trump condemned six Democratic lawmakers for “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” Even all the Washington “swamp” talk is rabble-rousing – swamps are toxic and must be drained.

Similarly, Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) shouldn’t have called the duly-elected President of the United States an “existential threat to democracy,” while her Michigan congressional colleague Rashida Tlaib (D) shouldn’t have branded him a “war criminal.” And anyone romanticizing the murderer of Brian Thompson, the United Healthcare CEO, or, like the influencer Hasan Piker, invoking “social murder” to “explain” it, is part of the problem.

Amid so much media noise, with social media creating Algorithmic Radicals, spiraling deeper and deeper into violence-inducing echo chambers, many believe the shriller the better. But words matter – and tone matters too. It’s no better to have Candace Owens calling Democrats “demonic” than for Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Labor, Professor Robert Reich, to say “Donald Trump poses a threat to civilization.”

In “The Nature of Prejudice” (1954), Harvard’s legendary social psychologist, Gordon Allport, studied racism to show how words can kill. His five-point scale built from “verbal violence” – trash-talking – to snubbing, discriminating, wounding then killing. With so many angry, lost, broken Americans today, the overheated rhetoric creates armies of rageoholics ready to fight on the street – or hunt down political enemies.

Long before the Internet monetized today’s aggression-attention economy, America seemed addicted to political violence – roused by waves of barn-burners. Historians have long speculated about what causes this bloody red-white-and-blue affliction. It’s resulted in four martyred presidents, Civil War, and so many riots – against immigrants in the 1850s and by immigrants resisting the draft in the 1860s; by antiwar forces and pro-war forces a century later; and by racists against Blacks, and by Blacks against racism, among other manifestations. The violence may come from America’s wild, rollicking, frontier origins; many demagogues’ need to rally around some enemy; the alienation people feel in such a diverse, rootless, mobile, society; or the anxiety they feel amid America’s dynamic but chaotic economy.

Often, like today, high-stakes clashes over complicated challenges leave even reasonable people worried that their political opponents pose unreasonable threats.

Fortunately, America also has a rich history of leaders who stirred what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.” George Washington faced down a potential mutiny with his Newburgh Address in 1783, warning that “the flood Gates of Civil discord” would only “deluge our rising Empire in Blood.” By simply fumbling with his spectacles, the aging general broadcast a sense of humility and patriotism that calmed the furies.

In 1838, Abraham Lincoln’s “Lyceum Address” offered a “simple” answer to the great threat that most feared America faced –  collective suicide through internal dissension: “Let every American, every lover of liberty, every well-wisher to his posterity, swear by the blood of the Revolution, never to violate in the least particular, the laws of the country; and never to tolerate their violation by others.”

And in 1968, still mourning his beloved brother John’s 1963 assassination, Robert Kennedy soothed angry mourners in Indianapolis minutes after Martin Luther King’s murder. RFK proclaimed: “What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another….”

If our leaders, our social media influencers, our Facebook “friends” cannot model such behavior – these historical voices must resonate throughout the land. The White House Correspondents’ Dinner was filled with Trump Administration officials – and critics. But bullets, like pollutants, threaten everyone, whether they’re on the wrong side or not.

Americans need not bury the hatchet – but we must lower the rhetorical temperature. Jews have long appreciated the power of machloket, constructive, even if impassioned, debate. The Progressive educator John Dewey was right: “Democracy begins in conversation.” But democracy only survives when watered with self-doubt, open-mindedness, and respect for our fellow-citizens – especially when they exasperate us.

Published in Jewish Journal

The post Are Americans Finally Ready to Denounce Violence — Left, Right and Jihadist? first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

The special character of contemporary antisemitism is that it emanates from both the right and the left. Just a few years ago, the “new antisemitism” seemed to be a strictly left-wing affair, tied to the Israel-Palestine conflict and informed by the “Red-Green Alliance” between the Western Left and Islamist groups. Right-wing Israeli and Jewish commentators emphasized that fact and added it to the advantages of identification with the Republican Party and other conservative groups.

But in the last year and a half, this picture has been fractured by the emergence of virulently antisemitic right-wing “influencers” such as Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes and the cover they are provided by political and media figures such as Vice President JD Vance and Tucker Carlson.

Many commentators have expressed surprise at this development. Yet should this really be surprising? Hadn’t xenophobia, anti-immigrant sentiment and discrimination against various groups (starting with Native peoples and African chattel slaves) been intrinsic to America, at various times and in various circumstances, since its inception? Furthermore, conspiracy theories demonizing Jews and others may be a deeply rooted byproduct of modernity. One strong tradition in American politics, once associated with Southern Democrats but, since the 1960s, increasingly tied to the Republicans, holds that true membership in American society, with its rights and privileges, belonged to white, Protestant men, especially those who had been part of the American social fabric for generations. Such membership is not open to all people of any background who enter into the American social contract, but rather to a group with specific racial, ethnic, religious and gender characteristics.

On the margins of this restricted conception of belonging were organizations and movements that were more extremist in their racism, antisemitism and advocacy of conspiracy theories – the Ku Klux Klan in the 1880s and 1920s, Father Coughlin and the American Nazi Party in the 1930s; and Sen. Joe McCarthy (R-Wisc.) and the John Birch Society in the 1950s and ‘60s. While these extremist actors and movements have only intermittently become significant political factors, they should not be relegated to the “lunatic fringe.” Rather, they are structurally related to the “more moderate” mainstream.

A key trait of extremist groups is that they traffic in conspiracy theories, especially those involving Jews. Since the Middle Ages, Jews and other groups, such as Freemasons and witches, have often been described as secret players in a conspiracy to take over the world and enslave, dispossess, or even kill other populations. According to these theories, Jews play this role as agents of the devil or some other principal of cosmic evil.

Such thinking seems to be a result (in one fashion or another) of anomie or anomia, a concept first advanced by Émile Durkheim, the late 19th-century “father of sociology.” It refers to a social state of normlessness, that is, when the social norms that permit social interaction are unknown (or cannot be known), unclear or unable to be implemented. Durkheim showed that in such situations where individuals are cut off from social life, they will, among other things, engage in self-destructive behavior. This situation can be caused, among other factors, by rapid change in both negative and positive directions, either rapid impoverishment or rapid enrichment.

In essence, anomia means that the social world has stopped making sense. In such a situation, one might be susceptible to the suggestion that the forces governing the social world are hidden and generally malevolent, perhaps a conspiracy brewed by witches or Jews. Some have suggested that belief in conspiracy theories grants a feeling of having privileged knowledge, together with a sense of control. It has been hypothesized that the outbreak of one grand, hugely murderous conspiracy theory, the European witch craze (1480-1650), which resulted in the execution of 50,000 women and men, was linked to widespread moral confusion and anomie – feelings of living in an alien and indifferent universe in which, because of the religious wars, death and destruction became ends in their own right.

The emergence of conspiratorial antisemitism around the turn of the 20th century, embodied, above all, in “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” also seems to be related to moral and social chaos and anomie. This arose from rapid industrialization and urbanization in Europe, especially in Germany, and later from the mass, mechanized killing of World War I. Today, too, there appears to be a great deal of moral confusion and the widespread feeling that American society does not enable a meaningful and productive life. This is evident in the “deaths of despair” of middle-aged, lower-class white men, the epidemic of Fentanyl addiction across all classes, and the feeling of Gen-Z young adults that they will never achieve the fundamental attributes of American middle-class existence – one’s own home, good health insurance, adequate retirement savings.

We should not be surprised that conspiratorial antisemitism has reemerged in the current circumstances. But there is a deep reason that ties it specifically to the right. One of the major and recurrent generators of anomie since the end of the Middle Ages has been the clash of traditional markers of collective identity – race, ethnicity, religion – with the increasingly rationalized and technological means of production on the one hand, and the increase of social criticism based on liberal reason that traces back to the 18th-century Enlightenment and extends to the current “progressive” ideology. The contemporary “woke” mindset applies the rational, liberal ideals of equality and freedom to new areas of criticism – not only to gender, but to sexual orientation and behavior. Whether such criticism has value or utility can be contested, but it has certainly contributed to a pervasive moral confusion and lack of normative clarity.

Today’s anomie and the conspiracy theories that spring from it (including about Jews) may be an ironic byproduct of modernity. We should not be surprised by them, but rather focus our energies on mitigating them as we do with other unwanted byproducts of modernity, like other various forms of pollution.

Published in the Jewish Journal

The post Should We Be Surprised by Right-Wing Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories? first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.